How do I find which process is leaking memory? [closed]

Answer 1

Difficult task. I would normally suggest to grab a debugger/memory profiler like Valgrind and run the programs one after one in it. Soon or later you will find the program that leaks and can tell it the devloper or fix it yourself.

Answer 2

You can run the top command (to run non-interactively, type top -b -n 1). To see applications which are leaking memory, look at the following columns:

• RPRVT - resident private address space size
• RSHRD - resident shared address space size
• RSIZE - resident memory size
• VPRVT - private address space size
• VSIZE - total memory size

Answer 3

If you can't do it deductively, consider the Signal Flare debugging pattern: Increase the amount of memory allocated by one process by a factor of ten. Then run your program.

If the amount of the memory leaked is the same, that process was not the source of the leak; restore the process and make the same modification to the next process.

When you hit the process that is responsible, you'll see the size of your memory leak jump (the "signal flare"). You can narrow it down still further by selectively increasing the allocation size of separate statements within this process.

Answer 4

if the program leaks over a long time, top might not be practical. I would write a simple shell scripts that appends the result of "ps aux" to a file every X seconds, depending on how long it takes to leak significant amounts of memory. Something like:

while true
do
echo "---------------------------------" >> /tmp/mem_usage
date >> /tmp/mem_usage
ps aux >> /tmp/mem_usage
sleep 60
done

Answer 5

As suggeseted, the way to go is valgrind. It's a profiler that checks many aspects of the running performance of your application, including the usage of memory.

Running your application through Valgrind will allow you to verify if you forget to release memory allocated with malloc, if you free the same memory twice etc.

Answer 6

I suggest the use of htop, as a better alternative to top.